The Islamic State showed renewed vigor in Syria, attracting fighters and increasing The attacks, according to the United Nations and the US officials, are added to the volatility of a country still around the fall of President Bashar al-Assad.
The group is not yet as strong as a decade ago, when it controlled Eastern Syria and most of the northern Iraq, but there is a risk, the experts say, that the Islamic State can find a way to free thousands of hardened fighters who are held in prisons supervised by Kurdish Syrian forces supported by the United States.
A serious rebirth of the Islamic State would undermine a rare moment when Syria seems to have the opportunity to go beyond a brutal dictatorship. But it could also reverberate in a wider way, spreading instability through the Middle East. The extremist group once used Syria as a basis for planning attacks on the neighbors of the country and further abroad in Europe.
Between 9,000 and 10,000 Islamic State fighters and about 40,000 of their family members are detained in the north -eastern Syria. Their escape not only adds to the group numbers, but would also provide a stroke of propaganda.
“The jewel of the crown for the Islamic State is still prisons and fields,” said Colin Clarke, head of research for the Soufan group, an intelligence and global security company.
“That’s where the expert and hardened fighters are battle,” he said. “In addition to any muscle that add to the group, if those prisons are open, the pure propaganda value” would need the group’s recruitment efforts for months.
The best officials of US intelligence last month presented their annual evaluation of the world threats to the congress, concluding that the Islamic State would try to exploit the end of the Assad government to free the prisoners and to revive its ability to trace and carry out attacks.
The United States announced at the end of last year that its military had doubled the number of his troops on the ground in Syria, to 2,000, and his numerous strikes on the Islamic State take refuge in the Syrian desert in recent months seem to have fallen on the immediate threat.
But President Trump expressed profound skepticism in maintaining US troops in the country and a confluence of other developments in Syria has alarmed experts who say that, taken together, they could make it easier for the Islamic State to be further grouped.
The United States have hoped that the new Syrian government, led by a crowded affiliate of Al Qaeda, Hayat Tahrir al Sham, will become partner against an Islamic state in the resurrence. The initial signs have been positive, with the group that acts on the intelligence provided by the United States to interrupt eight plots of the Islamic State in Damascus, according to two high US military officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive operations.
But the sectarian violence of last month, in which hundreds of civilians were killed, showed the lack of control of the government on some forces nominally under his command, and it is not clear how much bandwidth will have to fight the Islamic State.
The Islamic State, a group of Sunni Muslim rebels, traces its beginnings to Al Qaeda in Iraq, where she was defeated by local militias and American troops. His fighters renamed the Islamic State and exploited the chaos of the Civil War of Syria to take over vast areas of the area and return to Iraq.
He gained notoriety for kidnappings, sexual slavery and public executions and has orchestrated or inspired a series of terrorist attacks throughout Europe. The group had been largely addressed more than five years ago by a combination of the Kurdish Syrian democratic forces in the north-eastern troops of Syria and the United States. But at the beginning of 2024, the Assad regime was increasingly on the defensive; His Iranian and Russian allies were lengthened by conflicts elsewhere; And the Kurds of Syria were forced to deviate troops to fight Turkish attacks.
But although it no longer holds much territory, the Islamic State is still spreading its radical ideology through clandestine cells and regional affiliates outside Syria and online. Last year, the group was behind important attacks in Iran, Russia and Pakistan.
In Syria, according to an official of the United States Defense Department which spoke anonymously to discuss information that has not yet been released publicly, the group claimed 294 attacks in 2024, compared to 121 which claimed in 2023
The attacks so far this year seem to have slowed down, according to the groups for human rights and the US military officials – in part due to the recent campaign of US bombings that aim for the Islamic State fighters – but it is still relatively soon in the year and the situation is suspended on the edge of a knife.
Aaron Zelin, a member of the Washington Institute who has monitored the activities and propaganda of the Islamist groups for more than 15 years, said that the disorders who face the new government of the remains of the Assad regime and the incursions by Turkey in Syria are his greatest challenges right now. But he warned that the Islamic State added another threat.
“A great attack on Damascus against foreigners or expatriates and everyone will change the way they see it, so we must be cautious,” he said.
The concerns for a possible escape prisoner by the prisoners of the Islamic State have been accentuated by the ongoing violence in the north -est. The detention centers in north-eastern Syria are supervised by the fighters led by Curi, the Syrian democratic forces, which also help protect the nearby fields that hold members of the Islamic State family. But those forces have been distracted by militias attacks with Turkish territies.
The Turkish authorities consider the fighters led by Curi as the Syrian branch of the Kurdish separatists in Türkiye who have embarked on a 40 -year battle against the Turkish government. Turkey sees them as terrorists.
Prisons have already shown that they are a concern. In 2022, almost 400 Islamic prisoners linked to the state fled during an assault of the Islamic State to a prison in the city of Hasaka. At the time, the US special operating forces helped Syrian democratic forces to obtain control of the situation.
Since then, American intelligence on potential prison breaks has helped Syrian democratic forces to stop other plots before they occur, said one of the high American officials.
At Al Hol, the largest field in which women and children of the Islamic State have been detained for years, the extremist group has tested the boundaries. In a recent report, a United Nations Committee stated that the chaos that surrounded the fall of Al-Assad allowed some fighters of the Islamic State to escape the field, although it was not clear how many.
If the Syrian Kurds are weakened, “there is no doubt that it will create a void,” said Kawa Hassan, an Iraqi analyst and a non -resident member at the Stimon Center, a non -partisan organization in Washington. “And only the Islamic state thrives on the void.”